Noosack Falls

Noosack Falls, Mt Baker Highway, Sep’11

reaching here early morning (before sun got over the thick forest cover) meant that I would get a long exposure readily. I still found the use of a 8 stop ND Filter to further increase the exposure time that gives the moving part of the water a dreamy effect (and not everybody likes it).

I liked how the top portion and the lower portion of water act like two vastly different worlds, in both their varied colors and dynamism.

ND stands for neutral density.8 stops refers to 8 units of light. the short of it (behind all this technical jargon that i will come to later) is that a ND filter is nothing but a piece of black glass (sometimes even plastic)that cuts some of the light reaching your sensor (or film) – that’s all it is :)

how its used is perhaps more interesting.In brigt light you can not take an exposure less than a certain shutter speed(because their is so much light around) but there are creative cases when you would want to take exposures of a few seconds (to a few minutes) and that is where ND filters are useful. It is primarily a landscape photographer tool but can easily be used for Street photography too.Use your favorite search engine for examples :)